Seeing red: This is what hate speech looks like

What is the Red October movement hoping to achieve through its hate-based hodgepodge discourse that is a bizarre combination of radical left communist speak and backward racist doctrine, peppered with obtuse analysis and expedient misinterpretation of social statistics. No really — what do they see at the end of this tunnel vision? Do they think that if they send out enough verbal hate missiles the black population will simply disappear into thin air and they can get on with running the country along with workable roads, clean hospitals and job reservations for whites only?

The recipient of their vitriol is the black South African population, the members of which, it seems, are stealing all the jobs, torturing and murdering up to 17 white people a month and raping whites by the minute (and God knows they are not used to being raped by ethnics — as Steve Hofmeyr was quick to point out). Not only this, they (the blacks) simply cannot run a country and as a result all the hospitals are “filthy”, all the roads are up to shit, the entire country is falling to pieces and this is apparently, solely because white people are no longer in power.

But the discursive cherry on the top is the fact that genocide is being perpetrated against the white population in South Africa — barring the libtards, the communists, and shameless black-loving whites (like me) … because we are, according to this bunch — actively encouraging this genocide.

But as Facebook friend Alcide Herveaux points out: “The genocide story is ridiculous. 1.2% of the murders happening in SA annually are white according to 2009 Medical Research council stats. Whites make up almost 9% of population. According to Sunette’s stats of 17 murders per month it is around 200 white murdered per year. The rest of the 15 000 are other races.”

When asked about their claim that white Afrikaners are undergoing level six genocide in South Africa, Sunette Bridges is quick to say that is not about the numbers of people being killed — genocide takes on all forms of oppression, which lead to final genocide. This includes it seems “giving jobs to black people” and “renaming the cities and towns after African indigenous names”. Getting rid of the names of apartheid oppressors is genocide? Really? This document cites the South African government as being active in the encouragement of the genocide of white farmers in South Africa.

It does not seem to matter to them that we are all appalled by murder of any kind but that we cannot support the fabrication of facts and figures to present one group as being the victims of a genocide, which cannot be proved to actually exist.

Apparently as Bridges told radio presenter Rowena Baird in an interview on SAfm, it is also about the president once singing Umshini Wami — to which Bridges has liberally added the words — “rape the dogs”. When it was pointed out to her by Baird that we would clearly hear the word izinja in the song if it were indeed there, Bridges raised her voice to an imperious attack that implied that Baird, a mere black, had no right to question her truth. Her tone was indeed, a metaphorical sjambok and Baird had to grit her teeth and get through the tense interview without losing it — kudos to her for such fortitude.

You can listen to the podcast here.

After the radio interview this commentary was to be found on Bridges Facebook site in relation to Baird.

Then came the Aljazeera show about Red October, which I was invited to participate in. I turned it down based on my understanding that it is useless to argue against their irrational racism — I prefer to write at them than go blue in the face on a public podium about it. Besides which I think it is black people to whom they must answer, not fight with me about what sort of white I am.

In the show both Dan Roodt and Bridges were strident and confident that the pearls of swine wisdom that fell from their lips was the God’s honest truth. The rest of us were “pathetic libtards” as some tweeted during the show. But this comes as no surprise as according to them some of us are even “black-cock-loving social terrorist morons” among other delightful multi-epithets.

During the show Roodt and Bridges claimed they are “human-rights activists” and it was implied — after the show on social media — that we “the communists”, are actively working to rob them of their rights to cultural expression. More likely though is that we are actively working to reflect back to them their sense of entitlement at their so-called God-given right to be white, arrogant, superior, hateful and sanctimonious. Why? Because some of us do in fact respect and celebrate diversity and will not stand idly by while the right wing create a propaganda machinery of prejudice and anti-black hate mongering while also attributing this malice to all whites.

(I do have to add though, that at least with this lot we know what we are dealing with and they do not have the arrogant temerity to say dubious things like “I agree with the content but will punish her for tone”. Get over yourselves. If you agreed with the content you would not inadvertently feed right-wing supremacy by fighting about tone.)

Anyway, moving on from liberal hypocrisy back to white supremacy …

I asked the question in my video contribution on the Aljazeera The Stream show (click here to see the show) what the systemic machinery is that the right-wing discourse seeks to create or feed into with their homily of fear and the demonisation of blackness. Though I have written about this before it became very clear to me while listening to their ludicrously constructed arguments, that what they seek to do first and foremost is discredit and demonise black South Africans — but mostly black South African men. It is black South African men who they perceive as the biggest threat to their wealth, privilege and status quo. Thus everything they put out, from xenophobia to crime, to baby rape, to corrective rape, to women abuse, to corruption, is placed squarely at the feet of black men. They spend a lot of their time and resources feeding this myth through curating stories of black male crime and corruption — totally overlooking white crime of course. This is the war of patriarchs. It is the discursive space in which the white Afrikaans patriarchs of the right wing pit themselves against those whom they perceive as the next wave of patriarchal power players.

The terms in which they speak of “the blacks” are disgusting and dehumanising. The right wing will “plagiarise” the language of many ideologies and appropriate anyone else’s struggle vocabulary, as long as it suits their discourse of demonising the black SA male. They will use African foreigner’s concerns about xenophobia and black lesbian narratives about corrective rape (without their consent) to push their own white anti-black male propaganda. See video in this article.

They even refer to our government as “a communist government and the ANC a far left-wing terrorist group”. And President Zuma is referred to as a “Kaffer Dog” in one of the screen shots that has been doing the rounds this week.

Besides being really obtuse and even infantile, this is pure hate speech and defamation. But where is the outrage? Besides a handful of mostly Afrikaans protestors the white middle class has been particularly silent over this furore.

We know though that largely the white middle class and their gatekeepers choose to get outraged over things that insult them directly, like utterances made by Zuma about how whites “treat dogs better than their gardeners”, or the banning of The Spear — yet they remain silent when movements that host up to 40 000 white followers insult the entire black population with heinous public invectives. What’s up with that? Is this elitism, hypocrisy or just plain indifference? One would imagine that it is important to take on the wave of hate speech that has hit our public spaces and that some have said “reeks of possible treason and defames an entire nation of people”, based on their skin tone.

There are of course white people who care enough to make a stand and some Afrikaans anti-racist activists have been actively lobbying against the Red October campaign and infiltrating right-wing sites with satire, parody and mockery to destabilise the ongoing narrative. One such group is Suid Afrikaners op wie ons Trots is en vir wie ons Skaam kry, the initiator of which, Hendrik Potgeiter, has been recording hate speech found on the sites of Bridges, Hofmeyr and Roodt.

Here is a link to an album that has screen grabs of the most heinous examples of the hate speech that permeates our public spaces right now. (You will need to register to see pics in full size.)

You can follow their campaign on Facebook here.

At the end of the day though it is black people who these white supremacists are attacking and attempting to dehumanise with their discourse of hate — and it is black people to who they must answer. There are rumours afoot of a group of black activists beginning a movement called The People vs Red October, in which they plan to start a class action suit against the Red October group for defamation of the entire black South African population. They also plan to call on the government to take this hate speech seriously and begin to find ways to deal with it through the judicial system.

Perhaps it is also time for the right wing to reflect on the manner in which they are being manipulated by the leaders of Red October into becoming their own worst enemies as they buy into the construct of an imaginary genocide and declare a hate-filled discursive war against the entire black population.

And perhaps it is also time for many more white South Africans to also openly and publicly join the call to stop racism.